From Undaunted Courage—Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson,

and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen E. Ambrose, 1996:

 

"It seemed unlikely that one nation could govern an entire continent.  The distances were just too great.  A critical fact in the world of 1801 (when Thomas Jefferson took office as President of the United States) was that nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse.  No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat, no side of beef (or any beef on the hoof, for that matter), no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster.  Nothing ever had moved any faster, and, as far as Jefferson's contemporaries were able to tell, nothing ever would.

"And except on a racetrack, no horse moved very fast.  Road conditions in the United States ranged from bad to abominable, and there weren't very many of them.  The best highway in the country ran from Boston to New York; it took a light stagecoach, carrying only passengers, their baggage, and the mail, changing horses at every way station, three full days to make the 175-mile journey.  The hundred miles from New York to Philadelphia took two days.  South of the new capital city of Washington, D.C., there were no roads suitable for a stagecoach; everything moved on horseback.  'Of eight rivers between here [Monticello] and Washington,' Jefferson wrote in 1801, 'five have neither bridges nor boats.'  It took Jefferson ten days to go the 225 miles from Monticello to Philadelphia.

"To the west, beyond the mountains, there were no roads at all, only trails.  To move men or mail from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Seaboard took six weeks or more; anything heavier than a letter took two months at least.  Bulky items, such as bushels of grain, bales of fur, barrels of whiskey, or kegs of gunpowder, could be moved only by horse-, ox-, or mule-drawn wagons, whose carrying capacity was severely limited, even where roads existed.

"People took it for granted that things would always be this way.  The idea of progress based on technological improvements or mechanics, the notion of a power source other than muscle, falling water, or wind, was utterly alien to virtually every American.  Writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century about conditions in the year of Jefferson's inaugural, Henry Adams observed that 'great as were the material obstacles in the path of the United States, the greatest obstacle of all was in the human mind.  Down to the close of the eighteenth century no change had occurred in the world which warranted practical men in assuming that great changes were to come.'

"Jefferson was an exception.  He had a marvelous imagination; Monticello was stuffed with gadgets he had invented.  He also had developed practical devices for the general good of mankind.  Farmers in Europe and America up to the end of the eighteenth century had used wooden plows with straight moldboards that showed no improvement over those of the ancient Romans.  It was Jefferson who developed the curved-moldboard plow.

… "Since the birth of civilization, there had been almost no changes in commerce or transportation.  Americans lived in a free and democratic society, the first in the world since ancient Greece, a society that read Shakespeare and had produced George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but a society whose technology was barely advanced over that of the Greeks.  The Americans of 1801 had more gadgets, better weapons, a superior knowledge of geography, and other advantages over the ancients, but they could not move goods or themselves or information by land or water any faster than had the Greeks and Romans.

"In Henry Adams's words, 'Rip Van winkle, who woke from his long slumber about the year 1800, saw little that was new to him, except the head of President Washington where that of King George had once hung.'  Describing the mind-set of the time, Adams wrote, 'Experience forced on men's minds the conviction that what had ever been must ever be.'

"But only sixty years later, when Abraham Lincoln took the Oath of Office as the sixteenth president of the United States, Americans could move bulky items in great quantity farther in an hour than Americans of 1801 could do in a day, whether by land (twenty-five miles per hour on railroads) or water (ten miles an hour upstream on a steamboat).  This great leap forward in transportation—a factor of twenty or more—in so short a space of time must be reckoned as the greatest and most unexpected revolution of all—except for another technological revolution, the transmitting of information.  In Jefferson's day, it took six weeks to move information from the Mississippi River to Washington, D.C.  In Lincoln's, information moved over the same route by telegraph all but instantaneously."  (Pgs. 52-54).